


don't waste your time (or time will waste you)

by rosewitchx



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Creepy The Handler (Umbrella Academy), Dissociation, Gen, Happy Ending, I promise, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Torture, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Past Character Death, Post-Season/Series 02, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting, Temporary Character Death, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, Underage Drinking, Unethical Experimentation, the babies all get to Live a Life worth Living
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:54:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26229034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosewitchx/pseuds/rosewitchx
Summary: He was an old man. He is sixteen. Ben dies next week. How does he know that?“I think I broke it,” Five stutters, and for the first time in her short life Vanya sees absolute terror in his eyes.- Or, Five travels back again. Something goes wrong.
Relationships: The Hargreeves Family, past Dolores/Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy)
Comments: 54
Kudos: 492





	don't waste your time (or time will waste you)

**Author's Note:**

> title: knights of cydonia - muse

“I think I broke it,” Five stutters, and for the first time in her short life Vanya sees absolute terror in his eyes.

He’s shivering, even under the blanket Mom had brought him. He’s been staring at the sandwich Vanya made him for at least ten minutes. This is the first time he’s spoken so far.

“Broke what?,” Vanya asks him. Five shakes his head. She tries again: “where were you?”

“The future,” he tells her. “It’s horrible.”

He was an old man. He is sixteen. Ben dies next week. How does he know that?

He was a survivor. He was a hitman. He was a monster. He was an idiot.

Delores. _Delores._

Who was she? Who will she be?

His memories are fragmented. He can see glimpses, he _knows_ things, but he has no context for them, no means to make sense of them. His memories are scattered. _He_ is scattered. He is a remnant of someone who should not exist as he is. 

How does he know that?

Dad puts him in timeout. He’s been missing three years. (He’s been gone way longer, he thinks, but if he says that he’ll be questioned as to where he was, what happened to him, and he can’t say with absolute certainty, so he’d rather not say anything at all.)

He sees slivers of what has been, what might be. If he doesn’t focus, he loses the present entirely. He _has_ to concentrate, at all times, or he starts screaming because his lungs are filled with ash and his skin burns. He has to concentrate or there’s nukes flying over their heads, or he feels an uncontrollable urge to stockpile on beans.

“Number Five,” Dad calls him. It always manages to draw him back to the now. He still completes his task on time, but he knows Reginald is disappointed. 

(Why does he care?)

“So what happened to you?,” Klaus asks him.

Five’s been hiding Klaus’ stash of drugs. More importantly, he’s been _stealing_ Klaus’ already-counterfeit alcohol. He doesn’t remember when either of them started drinking. He doesn’t remember, actually, how they got to the rooftop, or why exactly they’re sharing a bottle of vodka as they watch the stars. He thinks the strong taste, the way it burns down his throat, should be somewhat off-putting to him, someone who in theory has never had alcohol before, but the truth is he feels uncomfortably at ease when there’s a bottle in his hands. 

“Nothing,” Five says.

“Yeah, right.” He rolls his eyes, takes a swig. “ _Nothing._ ”

“Is Ben okay?”

Klaus stares at him quizzically. “Ask him yourself, weirdo,” he tells him, and Five feels a little too disjointed to think about that.

(Ben isn’t dead. Why doesn’t he remember that?)

He takes the bottle from Klaus, drinks whatever’s left in it, and throws it towards the street. It shatters on impact. 

Dad finds him in the basement.

“Number Five,” he demands. “Your presence is not allowed here. How did you find this place?”

Five doesn’t even move. “I don’t know.” It is the truth. 

He sees Vanya, for some reason. He thinks it is her. She is pounding at the glass window. 

His hand rests on the lock. His chest tightens. 

He sees himself, locked inside, crying for days on end until he’d managed to jump out, a lifetime ago. He’s fairly certain that memory wasn’t ever jumbled. 

“This behavior is unacceptable. You will have special training instead of free time later today.”

He sees himself, locked inside. He is not a child anymore. _I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready._

“Okay,” he says, willing himself to stop shaking. He hasn’t had free time in decades, anyway.

His brain hurts.

He’s in the sixties, he thinks. He is a boy. He is an old man. His brain hurts. He is fighting himself, and he feels this crazed desperation: he has something he needs, and he has no other choice but to get it - even if it kills him. Luther is there, too. Luther should not be there. It was foolish to bring him along: no one should witness the monster he’s become. 

“Five,” Luther calls him. He’s holding his hand. “Five, focus on me.” He’s holding a rifle (his _own_ rifle) at his head. He’s holding Vanya’s boyfriend’s eyeball in his dead hands. 

The boiling homicidal rage evaporates as quickly and as suddenly as it had first appeared, replaced by pure terror. 

“I don’t know what is going on,” he admits. He sounds a little bit hysterical.

Luther squeezes his hand.

Ben isn’t dead. Not yet.

He stares at the equations covering his walls. He sees Ben, what’s left of him, splattered over the bank floor, and hears Klaus let out this agony-drenched, guttural _scream_ (but he’d never seen it happen). He feels Vanya’s book under his fingertips, the ghost of an item long-lost. 

He tiptoes out of his room, knowing a jump will certainly alert _at least_ the Horror. He just takes a peek at his sibling, sleeping somewhat peacefully next door, before making his decision. 

“Ben is going to die,” he confesses to Diego the night before the date. It’s snowing, but they’re still sitting outside, mostly because Five refuses to go inside. 

“You do know you look crazy right now,” Diego tells him. Five has no time for this: he knows that. He might really be losing it. But if he’s not - if time didn’t genuinely drive him mad after all - then he needs to prevent what’s coming. 

So he swallows his pride. “Okay, fine. But if you’re going to believe anything I say, believe that I’ve seen it happen.”

Maybe it’s the determination in his eyes. Maybe it’s the sheer desperation. Either way, his sibling just gives him a short nod. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

Diego drags him back inside. Five is too cold to stop him.

The Handler is holding him down and he screams.

The Handler is breaking him down.

The Handler is making him whole.

The Handler is fixing him.

The Handler is saving him.

His body is the perfect killing machine. His mind is shattered.

They go on the mission without him. He’s too unstable, Reginald deems. So he sits this one out, and he spends the entire time staring out the window and manically scribbling more and more equations on his walls. One of them, he hopes, has the answer, but the more he writes, the less sense the results make. 

“What the hell,” Vanya mumbles. He didn’t see her walk in. He doesn’t know where he learned the values for the variables. He’s thinking whoever keeps making them flash right into his brain is a fucking imbecile. 

“Have you ever felt indescribable rage,” he asks her.

She doesn’t even look phased. “I’m going to leave you alone now,” she says, walking back out.

“No, wait,” he stops her, before he even knows he’s doing so. And she does. She stands by the doorframe, staring at him. He must look insane, as everyone keeps calling him behind his back: a sleep-deprived, arguably-sixteen year old superhero gone mad by his powers, holding a black sharpie to the wall to the point where his fingers have gone beyond merely stained and have become the dark itself, with a crazed stare and all-too-thin body. He wouldn’t blame her for leaving. And he feels small, so so small when he asks her, “could you stay?”

She stares at him. That’s all she does. 

“Please,” he forces out and regrets it instantly. He’s never begged before. Has he? He doesn’t need her company. He just needs her _alive._ He needs her living, he needs her playing first chair in front of hundreds, needs her happy, even if it’s away from himself. He’s spent so long alone. He can do another eternity. He doesn’t mind. Not for her; not for _any_ of his siblings. He’s burned down empires, worlds, innocents for them. He can do a couple more. He will fight, and fight, until every light except for theirs has been extinguished. 

He’s a monster. He doesn’t deserve her company. But still Vanya sits down on the bed next to him, and asks him to explain his math, and he finally feels _understood,_ for once.

Ben comes home.

Diego is staring at Five. Five just stares at Ben. Ben. Ben.

He’s already changed fate.

He feels her hands all over him. 

“Five?,” Allison asks him, hesitant. “Are you okay?”

He feels her touch. Feels the way her lips snaked down his neck, ages ago. _I thought you’d do anything for your family._

Five nods. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

When Allsion continues being unconvinced, he tries a smile. The grimace sells his cover. 

Allison goes away, talking to Ben, and Five continues to exist everywhere at once. 

“Diego told me,” Ben says. “What you told him.”

Five doesn’t even look at him. If he does, he fears he might see a ghost. “I say lots of things.”

They’re walking to Griddy’s. The streets are empty; it _is_ quite late. Five hopes they’re still open. Five knows they _are_.

“He said you thought I was going to die,” Ben says. “He calmed the Horror down. I didn’t know he knew how.”

 _After Ben’s death,_ Vanya would’ve written, _there was nothing left to keep us together._

There’s no shootouts to Istanbul at Griddy’s, regardless of whether or not he flinches whenever he sees the nice waitress, regardless of the twitch of his hands as he twirls the butter knife in his hands and daydreams of stabbing necks with it.

“Five,” Ben insists. They’re sitting in a booth, now, waiting for their donuts. Time leaps like that. 

“You’re not dead now,” Five tells him, and they leave it at that. 

He is sixteen. Ben didn’t die.

He is sixteen. Dad hands him a bottle of pills (he thinks of Vanya’s ex-boyfriend and of crumbling homes). Five takes them. Nothing changes.

Time runs through him. Time wastes him.

He is a survivor. He is a killing machine. He is a monster. He is an idiot.

“You’re here because of your own failures,” Reginald tells him. On the floor before him, Diego holds his own arm, attempting to hold back his pain. 

Five burns, but it is not the embers of the world setting him alight. For a moment, all he sees is red, like he’s wielding an axe and murdering businesspeople. He craves blood, he wants nothing more than to lay waste to him and this house that has done nothing but hurt his siblings. 

_You did this,_ he reminds himself. _You couldn’t hold back your strength._

“Yes,” he grits out, and his fingers twitch for a knife. He almost reaches down and takes one. 

He lays awake at night, thinking about how wrong that felt, for some reason.

The Handler is holding him down and he screams.

“Again,” Reginald barks.

The Handler is breaking him down.

“Please,” he whimpers.

The Handler is making him whole.

“Bodies are disposable,” she tells him, a whisper to his ear.

The Handler is permanently damaging him.

“I don’t want this,” he cries. “I want to go back.”

The Handler is destroying him. Or the person he used to be. He aims, fires, fires, fires, and they’re all bullseyes. He slashes, stabs, swings, hits, beats to a pulp, until there’s red all over him and his father finally smiles. 

“Again,” the Handler orders.

He forces himself to get ready again. 

_Enough,_ he’d said. 

The Swede had stared. His gun still trailed Five’s head. His hands shook. When had this happened? Why did everything hurt?

 _Enough,_ the man had said, dropped his gun and left. 

He is seventeen.

He scavenges the streets, hoping to find the last remaining Coke in the wasteland. The world is a little less on fire, now, but his body has never stopped burning.

He is seventeen, and he knows how to chop off arms and legs in ways that are both efficient and excruciating. 

He is seventeen, and he is running against time. 

He is seventeen, and he’s leaping out the window with Klaus, Ben, and Vanya.

Vanya plays the violin. They left their meds at the house; for Five they weren’t effective at all to begin with, but it’s different with Vanya. 

The first time her eyes glow after an argument with Ben, the first time the room resonates with energy, Five digs his nails into his palms until they draw blood.

“I’m not scared of you,” he tells her, later on. 

She smiles. It’s the first genuine smile she’s shown him since he came back from whenever he was before. “I’m not scared either.”

He listens to her play the violin and sees her in his dreams, clad in white, playing the world’s last sonata. 

Time is scattered.

He is scattered.

Sometimes he wakes and sees fire, and Ben has to reassure him that he’s not, he’s just seeing things. He drinks, and drinks, until _Klaus_ of all people throws away all the good stuff. Drinking never helped anyway.

Sometimes he wakes and he’s bleeding out in a barn, and _she_ is looming over him. Seconds, not decades. Enough. _Enough._

“I’m tired,” he tells Delores.

“I know,” Ben answers, petting his head. His lip wobbles.

His memories are fragmented. He can see glimpses into a dark future, a world that will never happen because he’s _already_ prevented it. A world that scared him so much he’d broken his mind trying to change it. He is a remnant of someone who should not exist; the records of a person that existed too many times to be healthy. 

“I don’t know why this happened,” Five says. 

All Ben does is keep petting his head. 

He dreams of Allison, but it’s not her. She has beautiful, long dark hair and a shy smile. She’s married, for the second time, before any of them were ever born. 

“I heard a rumor,” she says, but her voice is the Handler’s, “that you stopped running.”

He wakes up with a scream.

He looks at his siblings, tearing his gaze from his designated Calculus Wall for the first time since morning. Takes a sip from his cup of coffee. He can’t remember when he started drinking it black. “I figured it out.”

It’s his eureka. His epiphany.

“What?,” Klaus starts. “Did you find out why you dress like you’re eighty?”

Ben swats him. “What did you figure out?”

Five can’t help the grin that escapes him. “I literally _broke_ through time!,” he laughs, like that’s a good thing. “I thought I was crazy! I’m just a fragment of myself shattered through the timeline, it’s _obvious_ when you think about it.”

The three stare at their sibling.

Vanya stands up from the couch, then, and heads for their kitchenette. “I’m gonna make more coffee. It’s too early for quantum physics.”

Let’s rewind for a moment. 

He was thirteen, and he’d fucked up. 

The world was on fire. The air buzzed with energy, and everything was hot, _hot,_ and his tears felt relieving running down his face. He pushed through the wreckage, through the agony pulsing through his body. 

He was an idiot, a child. And he couldn’t go back. 

He was sixty, and he was trailing Kennedy’s head through his scope. 

He was sixty. He kept thinking about the end, back then. A copy of Vanya’s book rested heavy inside his coat, and even though he hadn’t read a word she’d written in decades he still knew it by heart, all the things she’d shown the world. _Extra Ordinary._ He opened it, looked over its contents, looked at the one variable he wasn’t certain on. Looked back at the President. 

_Fuck it._

He was sixty, and he was thirteen. 

He couldn’t handle his siblings’ stares. Like they were seeing a ghost (he was fairly certain, at least, that Klaus had thought so for a second). But if he pretended he was alone he’d just crumble, so he didn’t. He focused instead on the task at hand: saving them. It was easier than he thought it would be, and at the same time, so incredibly difficult. Luther was an asshole. Diego was an idiot. Allison tried her best, but it just wasn’t enough, and also he was fairly sure she kept comparing him to her daughter. Klaus was high and unpredictable, Ben was _dead,_ and Vanya had no physical way of helping him.

He thought he had everything under control, all things considered. Yes, he worked mostly alone, and he was being chased by an entire time-cleansing organization, but at least _he_ had all the cards. Maybe he got shot once or twice, but it’s not like he was a stranger to injury. He could keep damage to a minimum. He would stop all of it. 

And then he began messing up.

The shootout at the donut shop. A home invasion. A dead detective. Klaus’ round-trip to the sixties. And then suddenly Vanya’s serial-killer boyfriend showed up dead, and Allison was bleeding out on the carpet, and Vanya blew up the house, and the moon.

And he did what he could. He jumped.

And then, another week later, he jumped again.

And then, an hour after that, he jumped one more time. And he must’ve messed that one up, because there’s a lapse in his already-jumbled memories right there, and the next thing he knows is _I think I broke it_ and falling apart in the kitchen next to Vanya. 

His memories are fragmented, but of course they are. He hit his brain with a sledgehammer trying to fit it through a thin hole in the fabric of time, and while it managed to squeeze through, it’s only natural it did so because they were shattered beyond recognition, spread across the eras, condensing into himself. He is not a remnant of someone who should not exist, not exactly; he is time itself, a teenager with too much power, an old man with too much baggage. 

It’s only natural he’d forgotten. And if _he_ had, then it’s only natural his siblings forgot, too.

Knowing how it happened doesn’t make it easier, though. 

He still wakes up from terrifying nightmares of what he now knows to be his past as a serial killer. (He doesn’t have many memories from that, yet - he does remember screaming for eternity as his body was changed against his will, turned into something monstrous, all those years ago, screaming until he could scream no more). He doesn’t remember everything yet, and while the memories still come back as dizzying flickers of past and future, the episodes are less frequent, less intense. And no one remembers him or what they all went through - not yet. He doesn’t expect them to ever remember, either. Just a gut feeling. 

He’s eighteen when Diego and Allison leave home. Ben and Klaus move out into their own apartment after a while, and then Luther leaves the nest, too - something that surprises them all. 

“You didn’t do that before,” Five tells him, like that’s not cryptic at all, when they meet for coffee one morning. Luther’s working at the coffee shop Vanya and Five like to visit, so it’s less of a _meeting_ and more of a _coming to visit our big brother at his first job._

“Leave home?” He’d explained his breakthrough to the others when he could, and thankfully they’d believed him, or at least some part of it. Luther had been the one who believed it the least, at first, but the time travel part was consistent enough that he’d eventually grown to accept it.

“Yeah. You stayed there until the very end, I think. Did some pretty dumb shit, too.” 

“Huh.” Luther leans against the counter, momentarily distracted from the order he’s supposed to be making. “I saw how Dad treated you, though. You told us all that. And— what he did to Vanya.”

 _And what he did to you,_ Five thinks, and sips his cup. _But that won’t happen now._

“I’m glad you got out,” he says, and he means it. His lips curl just the slightest hint upward. 

His body is the perfect killing machine. He won’t let himself forget that.

The people responsible for the atrocity that he is are dead, now and forevermore, felled by his hand. He dreams of that often. He dreams of his hands holding that axe, the murder weapon, and he burns, but it is not the embers of the world setting him alight. He dreams of the way he had felt, like he was on fire, seeing nothing but red, fueled by vengeance and determination (a botched deal, hadn’t that happened?).

When he wakes from those dreams, it’s hard to shake off the feeling, the anger. And Vanya can always tell, because he locks his door and his windows in an effort to keep her safe.

She plays the violin for him, those days. And when he deems it safe to come out they order takeout and he feels safe, safe, safe.

It’s hard. Agonizingly so. But there’s easier days coming. 

Luther waits for him outside their building, smiling, and as they walk to One’s campus he wraps an arm over his shoulders. They go to the planetarium. Five finally gets to see the stars.

“It’s beautiful,” he says. 

“Isn’t it?,” Luther replies, and he gives him a knowing look.

_The Handler is holding him down and he screams._

Diego wins his first boxing match. They’re all there, cheering him on. Even his _girlfriend_ is there, and none of them will ever let him forget that, much to his embarrassment. He smiles at them, nonetheless, with the widest grin he’s ever seen from them.

_The Handler is breaking him down._

Allison’s first big movie comes out when they’re barely nineteen. She flies them over to Hollywood for the premiere. She’s radiant in her dress and she says, “you all look amazing,” and there’s stars in her eyes and stars in the sky. The movie is a summer hit, and their sister hits the skies. They never miss a premiere, ever.

_The Handler is making him whole._

Klaus is three years clean. They celebrate by going to the beach. Five drives them there, and the whole trip gives him a migraine between Klaus’ disgusting music choices and Diego and Luther bickering in the back, but when they get to the shore and their feet sink in the sand for the first time, it’s all worth it.

_The Handler is fixing him._

Ben writes his first novel. It’s a fantasy book about a group of completely ordinary children trying to survive in a world of miracles and magic. It’s a best-seller. By next summer, he’s published the next in the series - and a horror anthology, which eventually becomes a modern classic. 

_The Handler is saving him._

Vanya hands them invitations for her concert. She's first chair, the ticket claims proudly, and she tells them so when she calls them, small and nervous. They all show up. Her song shines beautifully through the hall, and they watch, mesmerized, as Vanya challenges the universe to a duel.

Thunderous applause. She grins to the audience, and Five is pretty sure he’s crying.

A man shows up at his doorstep while Vanya’s away on tour. His heart drops: it’s someone from the Commission, he thinks. He’s older. Tired. But he still smiles at him, all polite bureaucracy.

“May I come in?,” the man asks him. Five doesn’t move. “Okay, that’s fair. You probably wouldn’t remember me.”

“You’re Herb,” he manages. “Are you here to kill me?”

“What? No, not at all. It’s been a while, huh?” Herb lets out a tense chuckle. “You’ve caused quite the mess.” Five stares. “I promise you’re not in trouble. I would like to talk to you. Is that okay?”

“We can talk here.” He doesn’t recall much about Herb except from his name. He thinks he was kind, maybe. But then again, the Commission had never been _kind._

But Herb shrugs. “That’s okay, kid.”

And they talk. 

Herb, true to his word, doesn’t try to hurt him even once. He tells him this and that, like “I’m glad you’ve adjusted” or “we were worried about you all”, and Five struggles to keep his replies short. “I’m starting college next week”, even though it’s a formality at this point, or “Luther’s about to graduate”, but the man must already know that.

“What have you really come here for?,” he finally asks, tired of the meaningless circle they’re talking themselves around. And Herb understands, too. 

“We want to make a proposition,” he says. “It’s only come this late because of, well, the circumstances of your last jump. We couldn’t reach you.”

And so, as it turns out, apparently he hadn’t just moved backwards in time. He had actually, legitimately forced himself and his siblings into a parallel timeline, into bodies younger, into nearly identical lives, and he had been the only one with any memory of the fact. 

“That explains a lot, actually,” Five says. Why it had messed him up so badly. Why his equations often didn’t match up with what had actually happened. It was a miracle he hadn’t ripped himself into nothingness. “So what _are_ you saying?”

“We can stabilize you,” Herb offers him. “Your condition, I mean. You’d have all your memories, just as you were the day you left the timeline.”

“Sounds nice.” No more episodes. No more loss of control. But this is the Commission he’s dealing with. “What’s the catch?”

“Two years of service in HQ.”

Yeah, no. 

Five gives him a tight smile. “I’m gonna have to say no to that offer, Herb.”

“Are you sure? You could be free from… all the confusion. You’d be yourself again.”

 _What would you have done,_ someone had told him, once. He doesn’t quite recall his name, yet. _What would you have done, had you not gone to the future that day?_

He thinks of sneaking out to Griddy’s with his siblings on their seventeenth birthday, their last at the Hargreeves mansion. He thinks of eating donuts until they could eat no more, of his siblings helping him come down from an episode, of singing _Happy Birthday_ and running around the park at midnight, enjoying the fall chill.

_I am myself._

“You know what,” Five says, “I think I’ll manage.”

**Author's Note:**

> five: i deserve a happy ending  
> me: i know this. here you go.


End file.
